We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

When it comes to everybody else’s thing and their lane and their timing, I’m never doing anything intentional to, like, come after somebody. That will always be my biggest mistake or anybody’s biggest mistake if that’s their intention.

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

If you were to ask me what I want to do – I don’t want to be a celebrity, I want to make a difference.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust your team. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn quite a few times.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

I’ve learned that men and women who are living wholehearted lives really allow themselves to soften into joy and happiness. They allow themselves to experience it.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, content to dwell in decencies for ever.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

I always believed that when you follow your heart or your gut, when you really follow the things that feel great to you, you can never lose, because settling is the worst feeling in the world.

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

I don’t have all the answers.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

I remember I used to sleep on my records. In a room with no furniture. I remember I used to sleep in my car.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.

Single life is so overrated.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don’t have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

I’ve always kinda been a little outcast myself, a little oddball, doin‘ my thing, my own way. And it’s been hard for me to, to be accepted, certainly in the early years of my life.

I’m over being a pop star. I don’t wanna be a hot girl. I wanna be iconic. And I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. I feel like I’m highly respected, which is more important than any award or any amount of records. And I feel like there comes a point when being a pop star is not enough.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

I’m not intimidated by how people perceive me.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

I really have no interest in myself.